COLOSSAL
(US/South Korea/Spain/Canada/China/Luxembourg - 2017)
One of the most audacious and inventive films of the year, COLOSSAL is so offbeat and bizarre that its eccentricities are enough to carry it through its infrequent sections that don't work, like its uneven tone and its heavy-handed metaphors conveying its underlying themes. In a riff on her RACHEL GETTING MARRIED character, Anne Hathaway is Gloria, a hard-partying alcoholic who's been let go from a job at an online publication and has tested the patience of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) one too many times. He dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment, and she heads back home to the small midwestern town where she grew up. She gets reacquainted with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who runs his late father's bar and clearly still nurses a lifelong crush on her. Gloria doesn't change her ways, working at Oscar's bar and staying up all hours with Oscar and his buddies Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell). After sleeping off a bender on a bench at a local playground, she gets online and is horrified by breaking news and terrifying footage of a giant, Godzilla-like reptilian creature appearing in Seoul. When she sees the creature mimicking some of her own gestures, Gloria realizes that if she stands in a certain spot on the playground at 8:05 am, the creature manifests itself in Seoul as her sort of kaiju avatar. If she dances, it dances half a world away. If she scratches her head, it scratches its head. She reveals the secret to Oscar and the guys and when Oscar steps in the spot, a giant robot appears next to the creature in Seoul. When they start playfully horsing around and Gloria falls, several hundred people are killed when the creature falls and crushes them in Seoul. When Gloria sleeps with Joel, Oscar quickly goes from hurt to angry, using their newfound powers over the events in Seoul to guilt her about the deaths she's caused and keep her under his control, especially when Tim arrives in town to try and patch things up now that Gloria has made serious attempts to get sober.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL, OPEN WINDOWS), COLOSSAL is like a Toho kaiju if conceived by Charlie Kaufman. It initially approaches the concept as an inspired black comedy, but things gradually turn serious as Oscar grows more angry, more possessive, and even physically abusive toward Gloria, taking out his rage over the perceived betrayal of sleeping with Joel and threatening to flatten Seoul and kill all of its citizens if she doesn't submit to his will. As a metaphor for pulling one out of destructive and self-destructive situation, it's rather large-scale, but the entire film has such a WTF? sense of originality about it that it helps get over some of the less graceful passages. There's an attempt at an explanation to it all--a flashback to a childhood incident in the park, a map that shows a straight latitudinal line drawn from their town and Seoul--but it's still a little foggy and nonsensical. But in the end, these issues matters less than they would have in less imaginative hands. Even with its flaws, COLOSSAL is a film that earns its cult cred the old-fashioned way, and the performances of Hathaway and especially Sudeikis, who's a revelation here, are quite impressive. A strange one, for sure, and unlike anything you've seen before. (R, 109 mins)
BOYKA: UNDISPUTED
(US - 2017)
UNDISPUTEDs II and III were directed by DTV action auteur Isaac Florentine, who gets a producer credit here but passes the torch to Syfy vet Todor Chapkanov (MIAMI MAGMA, CRYSTAL SKULLS), whose execution of the fight sequences does a mostly solid job of replicating Florentine's master touch, but the big showdown between Boyka and Koshmar is over way too quickly and isn't put together as well as it should be. Of his three turns as Boyka, this gives Adkins the most space to act, but his arc is a bit predictable and cliched and it's pretty dumb how the film has Boyka fighting for Zourab under his own name in public when he's a wanted man in Russia. Still, in an era when VOD/DTV action is defined by guys like Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, and now Jean-Claude Van Damme coasting through doing as little as possible, the 41-year-old Adkins has genuine star quality, busts his ass time and again and has more than paid his dues over the years. He really should be headlining bigger movies by now (I seem to say this every time I review a new Scott Adkins movie), and while BOYKA: UNDISPUTED is a notch below the Florentine sequels (does anyone even remember the Hill movie anymore?), it's still way above average for this sort of thing. (R, 90 mins)
UNFORGETTABLE
(US - 2017)
Basically a Lifetime movie with a few F-bombs, some splatter, and a great view of Rosario Dawson's body double's butt (Di Novi doesn't even competently match the shots of Dawson and the double, whose presence would be painfully obvious even if she wasn't listed in the closing cast credits as "Rosario Dawson's body double"), UNFORGETTABLE is lethargically paced and never really cuts loose. Even the big catfight between Julia and Tessa seems to be over as soon as it starts. It hits every trope and cliche and the genre, it does nothing with Whitney Cummings as Julia's wisecracking best friend who helps her uncover dirt on Tessa (UNFORGETTABLE is so going-through-the-motions that it doesn't even bother killing off Cummings' pointless character), and it really only comes alive for a couple of scenes where Cheryl Ladd turns up as Tessa's chilly, perfectionist mother, who's even more of an ice-cold bitch who only speaks when she's got something negative to say to Tessa ("You didn't bake scones?" she scoffs at Tessa's store-bought pastries; "You're dragging your knife...and your silver needs polished!"), making it clear why Tessa is the way she is, almost generating a little sympathy for her in the process. But UNFORGETTABLE can't be bothered with multi-faceted character complexities. Dawson seems to know this is junk, the bland-to-the-point-of-transparency Stults looks like a third-string Peter Krause who's just biding his time until his perpetual stubble gets a little grayer and he can take over as the Trivago pitchman, and in the right hands, Heigl could've had some self-deprecating fun with the parallels between her character and her image as a difficult diva with a stick up her ass, but UNFORGETTABLE just coasts by doing the bare minimum. With the help of overqualified cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (THE BLACK STALLION, THE RIGHT STUFF, THE NATURAL, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST), who likely wouldn't be involved with something this junky if not for Di Novi, UNFORGETTABLE at least looks polished and professional on the surface. It's marginally better than the INCONCEIVABLE, another recent "(Blank)-from-Hell"'90s throwback thriller, but all these glossy retro potboilers end up demonstrating is that these things were a lot more enjoyable 25 years ago. (R, 100 mins)